We are all looking at the cloud to move services away from offices, reduce workload and increase availability. This article breaks down 6 reasons why Google Apps is better than Exchange.

Capital Expenditure reduction

An organisation hosting a local exchange server will spend more money than an organization outsourcing the email services from Google. Costs involved with exchange server include:

The cost of purchasing a high end server to support the exchange server, most of the exchange installations require a server with high specification such as high RAM , disk space as well as processing power, such servers are usually very expensive. Microsoft configurations require at least two physical servers for full redundancy configuration, this is a very complex configuration and the cost of hardware is doubled.

The cost of purchasing licenses from Microsoft. Licenses are offered according to the number of users, such licenses are usually very expensive

The cost of hiring a highly trained professional to install, maintain, configure and run the complex Microsoft Exchange server. Such professionals are paid highly.

The cost of buying new servers after two or three years to take care of upgrading exchange from one version to another.

Google Apps are cheaper because all the costs outlined above are eliminated and the only cost involved is the cost of annual subscriptions.

Mobility

Google’s Gmail is more user friendly and it can be accessed from anywhere provide you have internet connection. Although Microsoft Exchange offers the same functionality Gmail remote access is more user friendly compared to outlook web access or outlook anywhere. Anyone who is familiar with a normal Gmail account will not need further training on how to use the company Gmail client access platform. Gmail provides full synchronisation for calendar, contacts, and email across all your devices, Android, iPhone and Windows without further licensing. In some cases Exchange requires extra Active Sync licenses to enable this functionality.

Downtime / Redundancy

Microsoft Exchange is more likely to develop issues associated with mail servers as compared to Gmail that has been configured by a team of highly qualified professionals and the redundancy has been taken care of at very high levels including cluster configurations across different countries in the world. In the unlikely case a Google mail server goes down your emails will be available from a different location without user knowledge, unlike a local hosted Microsoft Exchange set up where a user will not be able to access emails when the server is down.

Maintenance costs

A local Microsoft server will require maintenance in terms of hardware, while Gmail will not require any. Gmail is constantly updated for free, unlike Outlook and Microsoft Exchange whereby when updating you are required to purchase new licenses for both server and client, and for the Windows server itself. For example migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, Windows Server 2003 – Windows Server 2012, Outlook 2007 – Outlook 2012 will require you to buy three sets of new licenses.

User friendlessness

Gmail offers a comprehensive communications experience with a wide range of rich features as compared to Microsoft Outlook. The user interface is similar, whether you are in the office or at home. Outlook offers a different interface while in office you a have Microsoft Outlook client interface and while at outside office a different interface via the outlook web access, this has confused many users.

Backup

With Gmail your local backup is not required since your emails are hosted on the cloud, but with Microsoft Exchange a local backup of the email database is essential. If you are concerned about this you can regularly backup data from Google Apps using a number of third party tools, and Google provides a number of tools to download information too.

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